Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Deck the halls

Confession: I LOVE Christmas. . .I know, I know, everyone loves Christmas right? Even the Scrooges out there can find something to like, the carols, the decorations, the crafts, the cookies, the gift giving. . .But, we spend a large part of our year thinking about Christmas. . .in fact I would say I spend most of the year thinking about Christmas. We decorate the first weekend in October (yes I know, it’s early, but as mentioned above, we really love it), which means we have the month of September dedicated to pre-decorating cleaning (once the trees go up, there are corners that will not be vacuumed until January).

There’s also a lot of planning, I have a detailed diagram of the house that shows where all the decorations will go this year, that typically starts getting reviewed in late August. This year, I stumbled upon the Christmas in July sale on QVC one weekend, while I don’t by much from there and can go years without turning on the channel, on the occasion I find something worth watching, I can’t turn it off, so I ended up with several new decorative items from that sale.



As for the months leading up to July? Don’t worry, I did plenty of Christmas shopping then. I like to buy all year long as I find things for people, at this point, I have one person left to buy for, everything else is wrapped an under the tree. ..So, why do you ask have I waited until now to do a Christmas post?

That’s a great question, and I wish I had a good answer for you, but I don’t, so instead of harping on my laziness in posting, let’s focus on some of my favorite decorations around the house.

 
My favorite item is my black and white tree. It is rare for me to wear color, I own mostly black and white attire, the house is accented by various black and white pieces, so when I found a large collection of black and white ornaments several years ago on clearance in the middle of the summer, I couldn’t help myself. In one swift day of shopping in a back clearance room of a store in Madison, IN, I found most of these ornaments. Since then several others have been added. As you can tell, I use red as my accent color of choice.
 

This is our family of reindeer, Mommy, Daddy, and two children, sound familiar? We bought the big
two reindeer in September or October one year, and since it was too early to put outside (we may be
full-fledged Christmas inside, but we keep the outside “normal” until Thanksgiving as to not annoy our neighbors), we put them inside next to one of the trees. Then they grew on us, we started giving them gourds and corn to pretend to eat, and they never made it outside. Years later, the two original deer had some kids, the kids actually did go outside, we happened to buy them around Thanksgiving last year, so they went straight out there. . .this year? Well, it seems they are protected by their reindeer parents and I don’t think they’re budging. I would say we will just have to buy a new set for outside, but I’m concerned that they would then end up in the house too, and 6 is just too many under one roof.

The tree next to the reindeer is our Boyd’s Bear tree. This tree is filled with, Boyd’s Bears. How did I
come by so many Boyd’s Bear ornaments you ask? Well, it all started with this little tree. It’s the tree I had in college and every Christmas my mom would send me a care package with a couple new bears.Then, I graduated, and found a store that sells only Boyd’s Bears and went crazy. As in, truly crazy, my hands could not hold any more bears. . .until the second year, when I bought at least the same amount. When I went back the third year, I realized I had most of what they have to offer, and I haven’t bought any more sense then. We’ve received a couple for presents here and there, but this tree hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years, which is fine. The bears are happy and like their reindeer guard.




Our final stop for today is our family tree, this tree has all the ornaments from our youth, ornaments
from our kids earlier years, and all of the ugly ornaments that neither of our parents wanted, but both of us refuse to throw away, like this one. . .






We haven’t covered it all, but those are the highlights from our house. We actually bought our first live tree on Thanksgiving. It was a bit of an impulse buy from Whole Foods on the way home, so we bought a tabletop live tree. The only problem? We’re all out of ornaments, so we've started making some of our own, I’ll let you know how it turns out.


Merry Christmas!

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